I discovered a sound that leaks your exact location (and it's everywhere) - YouTube
- ID
- 42351
- Status
- summarized
- Published
- 03 Nov 2026, 1:32 PM
- Fetched
- 03 Nov 2026, 1:58 PM
- Provider
- Simon Willison
- Category
- developer-ai
- Original URL
- https://simonwillison.net/2026/Nov/3/a-sound-that-leaks-your-exact-location/
- Source URL
- https://simonwillison.net/atom/everything/
Summary
- Score
- 6.0
- Created
- 03 Nov 2026, 1:59 PM
- Tags
- Audience
- developersvibe_codersfounders
What happened
Simon Willison links to a video by Colsto demonstrating an OSINT technique: take the nearly imperceptible background noise of aircraft in a video's soundtrack, derive their Doppler curves, and cross-reference those against public ADS-B flight data — using aircraft speed, distance and the gaps between different flights to pin down where the video was recorded. The write-up is a pointer to the video, not a tool release; the concrete method is Doppler analysis plus ADS-B matching, not any new software.
Why it matters
If you record demos, vlogs or screen-share sessions with a live mic near a window, the ambient audio track can carry enough flight-noise signal to geolocate you — so strip or replace the original audio before publishing, or record indoors away from open windows. For anyone building user-upload video features, this is a reminder that audio is location-bearing metadata, not just content.
Discussion angle
Is this a creator-side opsec problem or a platform-side one — should upload pipelines strip, compress or perturb ambient audio by default, and what's the cheapest mitigation you'd actually adopt for your own demo recordings?